Not at all, it forces you to unify to storing character data as Unicode code-points. Eventually if you go down far enough, you're reading the raw bytes you spea

Not at all, it forces you to unify to storing character data as Unicode code-points. Eventually if you go down far enough, you're reading the raw bytes you speak of from some sort of external system/file/DB. It's at that point that you define your encoding, and never worry about it every again. Except for when you touch those external systems/files again, again with full knowledge about what encoding is required. Either way, if you're not dealing with differently encoded character data in Python 2.x as noted above, you're causing yourself some unnecessary headaches.